Greetings, I've been lurking here for a while and have received some very valuable information regarding the many aspects of webmastery. Kudos to you all :-)
Not sure how lengthy I should be regarding my domain before I get to the questions, but here goes:
I write all the code.
My domain has been online since '98.
I guess it's considered an educational portal site, currently containing some 5,200 links out, to what I think are good quality educational resources for those who wish to learn.
There are roughly 160 +/- indices ranging from 'Aboriginal Peoples' to 'Women' containing those 5,200 links.
I'm an altruist.
I've submitted directly to 'Quality' sites of like kind as well as Google and the other Engines, both manually and via software.
I've been listed in DMOZ for several years.
My domain is very Family and Children Friendly.
I get a fair amount of traffic for a non-commercial (ad bearing) site.
Google sends me traffic with such keywords as 'bulemia' (even misspelled as it is here <chuckle> and 'forensic accounting' to name a few.
(NortherLight used to send me traffic, but they dropped off the map for me/my site. Dunno why neither.)
It'sa .com from which I derive no income.
I've recently re-designed/re-wrote all my internal (indices) links and put up a spiffy 'missing.html' file to direct visitors to the root url - replacing all the old/dead internal indices. (I figured a 'live' link was better than those generic ones I see so often).
I also directly notified all those known to be linking to me, that I had changed the internal links.
I'm what they call a returning adult student at Penn State University (PSU) - Altoona College. As such, we have disk space where I've duplicated my work for fellow students.
At the bottom of all my indices (including those on PSU's server) is a 'Home' link. These links all point to my root URL.
<Psst! Yo, Glenn!>
Yes?
<get to the point, will 'ya?>
Ok.
Anyway, I've been using www.linkpopularitycheck.com (LPC) to determine who links to me.
Starting about two months ago I noticed increased redundancy listings from those sites who have started listing the DMOZ Project. By that I mean, many of those sites (who started listing the DMOZ Project) began showing up as links to a multitude of 'Reference/Education/Directories' from sites not neccessarily educational.
Additionally, all those links on PSU's server started showing up as back links to my work.
My robots.txt is fine.
Meta-tags are optimized.
My question is this: Will/Do all those Directory/Reference DMOZ type links - and those which began appearing from PSU's server - actually work against me/my rankings?
Also, in my stats I'm seeing a boom in hits to that 'missing.html' file I mentioned. So, I know the cached links are being re-discovered, so-to-speak. However, I'm not sure if those 'missing' hits dissuade the robots or not??
Mind you, it is _not_ a re-direct, per se, just a page containing an animated gif and some text telling the viewer of the re-design and a link to the root URL.
Oh, I've compared my site against the others with MarketLeap.com and I show up between homeschoolcentral.com and howtostudy.com with some 2,322 back links.
So, in addition to those questions already asked, is there a major purge taking place within the bigger engines I should be concerned with?
Have I done myself a disservice as discribed above? Have I done things correctly?
I've tried to describe my site without actually posting the URL as best I can.
As an aside, while that glossery on the home page is kinda nice, it doesn't really cover all the terminologies many of your 'master' posters use.
<Glenn>
What!
<Time to end this post now...>
Ok, ok, ok already. Sheese! I'm a newbie and very much allowed to get lengthy, ain't I?
<no>
Oh. :-\
Thank You.
